by Aussie Wine Guy
13. June 2008 08:27
Last weekend, we travelled south and slightly inland from the Gold Coast (Queensland, Australia) to an area known as Tambourine Mountain.
This area is home to the 'Granite belt' and a good deal of Queensland's wine producers. Queensland is not widely known for it's wine producers, so we had mixed expectations heading into the region.
The net result? Just as conflicting. We tasted a number of releases from three vineyards in the region: Witches Falls Wines, Heritage Wines and O'Reilly's Wines.
The Heritage has a very tidy release known as the Rabbit Fence (Cabernet Sauvignon/2005) which I think I rightly placed as a decent drinking red (tasty, but a little room to mature.. chocolate undertones not too strong or too passive), at a reasonable price ($16/bottle). We bought four bottles to take home.
Whilst at the Heritage (which is based on a converted church!) I tasted the O'Reilly's Shiraz (2005) and it wasn't bad at all. Still too young, but with lots of growth potential, it made me want to drive home and open the 2002 O'Reilly's I've had down since 2004!
We lastly visited Witches Falls vineyard. By this time I sampled just the Sav Blanc (skipped the other whites), Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz. A minibus full of tourists dropped in before I could sample their reserve Cabernet (which was a trophy winner evidently) but I wasn't terribly impressed with the non-reserves. The Sauvignon Blanc was not sweet but sour, bland and too much acid, unbalanced is an understatement - not a great way to kick off the tasting. The Cabernet and Shiraz were both too unrefined to merit attention.
I'm not sure whether the climate is just unsuitable to sustaining a matured red, or perhaps it is a symptom of experimentation and growth? We might try them again in a years' time. Staff were rather friendly and attentive.
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